


Mayday: Being an Account of How Equius Zahhak Accidentally Overthrew the Alternian Caste System by Illegal Application of A Spare Absorbency Plane

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: Twelve Verses [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Are Baby HorrorTerrors Cute?, Crack, Equius's Highly Offended Sensibilities, Eridan is highly offended that he isn't even named in the footnotes., Fix-It, Footnotes, Frankly Eridan's better off not being named in the footnotes., May 25th is Towel Day, The Ducking Blinged Swanning Boat, now with redic aftermath in the comments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:55:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4043134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Equius Zahhak Accidentally Overthrew the Alternian Caste System by Illegal Application of A Spare Absorbency Plane. Was the title insufficient explication?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mayday: Being an Account of How Equius Zahhak Accidentally Overthrew the Alternian Caste System by Illegal Application of A Spare Absorbency Plane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pyrrhic_victoly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victoly/gifts), [arcaladiwoompa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcaladiwoompa/gifts).



> To two friends who are purveyors of only the finest (and sometimes the finniest) of crack, please have serving, on the hive.

Now class, please keep in mind that when we celebrate the Fall of The Condesce and the Ascension of Her Imperial Concordination this night, it is a pearl of wisdom from the Concord Herself that we should also reflect upon our fortunes this day. While I expect that when you go back to your hives and lusii tomorn you will reflect on your personal blessings, your clades and frenemies and such, I thought that we might take a break from the more traditional forms of schoolfeeding to study a primary source of the very event that led so fortuitously to Her Concord’s Ascension. I refer, of course, to the implosion of the Formerly Imperious Condescension’s alien pleasure conveyance, also known as “The Ducking Blinged Swanning Boat”, and more specifically to the journeytroll engineeriquist directly responsible for the event. While their name is confidential, as are those of their quadrants, we do have a short first person public report of their experience. Please read it to yourselves during our reading period and we will discuss it until nutrition break.

A few themes of particular note for our discussion will be as follows: Did the engineeriquist act correctly? Does the reason _why_ they did what they did, or the circumstances, such as stress or the presence or perception of a pan-dimensional being change how we should judge their act? You will note that this is a very personal work, complete with confessions of feelings and certain parts of the engineeriquist’s syntax quirks, but that the grammar is actually Alternian standard and the writer’s typing quirks have been suppressed. One of our discussion items will be the cost and benefit of the free exchange of information and the extent to which we need or should protect privacy and how that is balanced against the needs of the Empire. I would like you to consider how you would have felt and acted had you been in the engineeriquist’s place. Finally, we will also be discussing interpersonal and systematic violence and how it, or its regulation or absence, modifies us as trolls and as citizens, and in what way circumstance modifies the appropriateness of violent or extreme actions. You may begin.

*

Deer Dairy,1

The circumstances and events that I am to recount are of such import that it is well above my station to speculate as to if they are happy, tragic, or simply the will of powers greater than trolls may understand.

To my great personal horror, I contributed directly to the unexpectedly early death of Her Imperious Condescension2, merciful HorrorTerrors have mercy upon Her. By virtue of her noble, neigh, _Imperial_ blood, that feature which would define us, as least previously, Her Imperial Concordination has risen to take Her rightful place at the top of the troll hierarchy. It may be a source of personal unease that her subsequent proclamations and actions have systemically begun to dismantle the very system which placed her upon the throne, but it is my place to support Her, and so I do, however _strongly_ it personally discomforts me. Now, it appears that I have mucked about quite long enough. The explanation is not so long as to justify the introduction, however shameful its confession. It began thusly:

On the night of the events which subsequently transpired, having just completed a commission by the sea for an indigo of some standing3, I found myself on that most distant of sandy beaches without a method of relieving the stress my most recent labors had instilled in me4. My moirail was at some distance and the expanse of crashing waves was already present. The sea compels, much like its greater inhabitants. I should not have looked, alone as I now was, but the crash of waves and surf was… fascinating. Constant, yet not identical moment to moment. I found myself immersed in calculations of fluid dynamics and so I lingered, and in lingering, doomed myself and the old order.

However long a time had passed since the decree forbidding adult return to Alternia, it was doubtless of little import to Her Imperious Condescension, either in the passage of time or in the violation of Her own edict. Nonetheless, one does not imagine such powerful personages to exist in quite the same physical space as one’s own mundane existence, and so when the massive and ungainly watercraft floated closer, I was first unaware, and then transfixed, long before I could discern that I owed my very life and duty to its owner. Agents of Her Imperious Condescension alighted on the beach, and commandeered my services for Her engine.5

I cannot properly describe the stature and very presence of Her Imperious Condescension. To attempt would be to fail and to make Her somehow lesser. Whatever the moral determinations of Her Imperial Concordination, I cannot speak so badly of her predecessor.

I also will not describe the particularities of the engine, for even now it haunts my dreams and would doubtless sing its siren song to any aspiring Engineeriquist. Suffice is to say that there were both beautiful efficiencies and terrible inefficiencies and also vice versa of both. What is perhaps the most dangerous and relevant detail is thus: the HorrorTerrors are quite real, and the central column was inhabited by one.

It is not my place to state if HorrorTerrors have life cycles recognizable by what we as lowly trolls or noble hoofbeasts experience but this HorrorTerror was small, and seemed quite lonely, and had very big eyes, or so I seem to remember, though there was also an empath of my moirail’s blood hue cohabiting the column and I am unsure how much _I_ perceived and how much was instead pushed at my perceptions by one or the other of them. 6 I could state that I _believe_ that the HorrorTerror existed both within and around the empath, but I cannot state that I _know_ it to be truthful. I can state that I _believe_ that the HorrorTerror wanted to go home and that the empath was very tired and wanted to die, but I cannot vow that that is in fact the truth. My brief time inside that engine room passed as if in a dream. 7

I cannot remember much of what occurred next, but that I corrected some of the egregious inefficiencies, due mostly to neglect and shoddy maintenance, or in some cases perhaps, a failure to think outside the Manual Standard8 when even the slightest nod to the latest research might have served to exponentially modify efficiency9. After each repair or modification I found myself once again before the HorrorTerror, the power source of the whole. I cannot justify what happened next. Surely it would be below my station, or if not my station according to Her Imperious Condescension, but my honor as the troll that my lusus raised.

I wiped my brow of that noble dew of honest work and I stuffed the so laden scrap into a showy but hideously efficient meeting of two cogs in the anterior propulsion conversion unit.10 Then, knowing that I had doomed Her Imperious Condescension and unable to live with my terrible treachery, I walked out of the engine room, up two floors, and cast myself over the railing to drown. I was acquired shortly thereafter by a fellow juvenile of the old order, and the seadweller saw fit to pull my unconscious body to shore and not into the depths.11

Thus end the relevant details of the event and I shall now return to my duties as assigned by Her Imperial Concordination.

*

1 My moirail insists that this is the correct address for one’s entries into this written medium. Having, as she does, extensive experience with forays into the conveyance of emotional import, I shall surrender, if not with the grace inherent to the nobler hoofbeasts, than at least with my attempt at it. Long Live Her Imperial Concordination.

2 It is my feeble understanding that she ought to have lived forever, barring violence or… accident. Oh deer, that really makes this all so much more confusing.

3 Let it be stated that social standing is not in fact a substitute for good taste. This at least I can freely recognize as evidence in favor of The Concordination’s movement toward a meritocracy. Having completed a delicate clockwork representation of this patron’s deceased lusus, it was personally most distressing for my patron to cover it with glue, feathers, and glitter. Had it merely been a robot, it would have been off-putting, but the  patron’s insistence that it have no power source and work solely from the winding of springs… well, such devices are heavily dependent on balance. The weight of the feathers alone caused a sort of lurching gait not un-akin to fungal zombies.

4 In truth, the source of stress was not in the labor but in the personal interaction and in the subsequent realignment of my perception of my patron’s perception of the value of my work.

5 I had previously been unaware of the tracking chips inserted in each of us prior to leaving the brooding caverns. The devices are primitive, but quite small, being the size of a petite legume, and generally located to the left or right of the cervical spinal column, unless the grub squirmed inopportunely. They contain only one’s grub identification number and limited broadcasting ability, and are powered biochemically from their hosts. They are generally unobserved as they do not broadcast unless first pinged with specialized restricted equipment. Psionics and those seadwellers who have attained biochemical electrical abilities sometimes deactivate them without noticing.

6 I have stared into the Void and the Void stared back and made barkbeast eyes at me. The HorrorTerrors exist. What is unknown is their nature, what they desire, and if they can, or wish to be, merciful. Or even if we can comprehend the answers to such questions. Also unknown is how this particular specimen came to reside in the engine or how it was trapped.

7 But who is to state if it was not a dream? The presence of a HorrorTerror itself may be argued to be proof of a dreaming state. Or perhaps its presence was the very definition of a dreaming state. I can only shamefully relate at the urging of my moirail that I felt a shameful pity for both inhabitants of the central column. It was certainly not flush and I do not believe it to have been pale. What does one owe those outside one’s quadrants and one’s hierarchical place? Do such duties truly change by virtue of the regime? Is one’s nature defined by one’s place or only shaped by it?

8 I am unable to state _strongly_ enough that the Manual Standard is both a glorious catalog and instructional of basic and standardized technological achievements _and_ that it should never be interpreted to be the sum total of what _can_ exist. There was innovation before the Manual Standard. There was innovation after. If the lackadaisical attitude that the Manual Standard today invokes in some came before innovation and no one ventured forth from its basic grounding, we would never have achieved space flight, FTL, or even the most basic of biotech. We would, in summary, be each and every one perennial pilgrims to the brooding caverns while psionics perhaps pushed single-masted sailboats across the surface of Alternia’s oceans like so many skitterbugs without even the most basic of gestalt adaptations and seadwellers swam naked for lack of durable immersible textiles. 8a

8a I am given to believe that these less than technologically imaginative trolls are also the main market for this particular genre of historical fantasy romances. Personally, I find nothing alluring about such udderly willful revisionism. Such ages didn't even have access to textured vegetable protein. 

9 I can only venture to guess that such was the sheer excessive power of an engine powered by a HorrorTerror that no one thought it necessary to refine the resulting amalgamation of Standard and grudgingly experimental for _efficiency_. I cannot help but find this short-sighted and, candidly, blatantly offensive.

10 It is a peculiarity of circumstance that this was more than a brief inefficiency to the engine. During the normal course of a night I use several such absorbency planes but a confluence of circumstances which I shall not recount nor try to justify led to this particular circumstance in which I was left with nothing with which to wipe my brow but what the smallest scraps of my budget might afford. It is a strange circumstance indeed that a sudden fashion for organic10a handkerchiefs among seadwellers should so synchronize with a brief period of personal financial extremity. It is a fact that my usual absorbency planes would have caught fire and burned, causing a bit of smoke, heat, and negligible soot or residue. It is a characteristic of the cheaper, synthetic absorbency planes that they melt into a most pernicious and stubborn residue of formidable adhesive qualities. In this, in addition to the personal discomfort of causing topical rashes, I find them a most inadequate substitute. To those who have stated that this was a premeditated act of terrorism I must state that had I _intended_ to kill Her Imperious  Condescension by means of mechanical sabotage I would have followed the traditional futile method of registering such frustrations by inserting one or more shoes crafted of carved wood. To those who are unfamiliar with this approved method of historical self-extinguishment, please refer to the treatise entitled: “All You Beaches Betta Do What I Say: An Explication of ‘Or Else’”.

10a As a brief side note I must express my vexation with the co-opting of the term “organic”. “Organic” traditionally refers to compounds and materials containing carbon. While the cultural adaption of the term refers to a worthy philosophy and such practices should indeed lead to _stronger_ and healthier trolls, I cannot help but quibble with diluting the original meaning.

11 The seadweller has subsequently expressed frustration that he could find no use for me, being as I was unappetizingly coated in various engine lubricants and also had failed to attain a body type suitable for either his particular sexual predilections or the more traditional evolving display of a landdweller corpse in an underwater hive. Sometimes all three of these are combined in one sequential formalized attack, but I have been unable to reconcile this with the individual in question. Perhaps he did indeed intend to drown me. I find it far more likely that, considering the source, he simply required an audience and I was the closest sentient. He is far too fastidious to leave a corpse attracting scavengers to his hive. Indeed, had he, or an individual of like personality, been in charge of engine maintenance, there would be no story to tell, such was the sheer accrual of inefficiencies due solely to an aversion to cleaning and maintenance. 


End file.
